Rev. Miller: The linchpin of Christianity

the Rev. Victoria Miller

Updated 9:45 pm, Friday, March 29, 2013

A "linchpin" prevents a wheel from sliding off its axle. The word also refers to something holding together a complicated structure. God's resurrection of Jesus is Christianity's linchpin. Without it, there would be no Christianity. The Christian wheel would fall off its axle. But what was it that happened when God raised Jesus from the dead? And why does Christianity's linchpin have to be something so hard to grasp?

Theologians, scholars, and seekers have struggled to put language around Jesus' resurrection -- language that would help us comprehend the resurrection and trust ourselves to it. Opinions have differed widely. Whatever happened, I think we are meant to understand that it was not a purely subjective experience of the disciples. I think we are meant to understand that there was an objective reality to which the disciples responded -- first with fear and trembling and eventually with gratitude and trust.

I have not met a resurrected person; but I have had two, for me quite extraordinary and powerful, experiences that speak to me of resurrection. The first happened during my training to be a summer hospital chaplain. Chaplains accompanied family members to the morgue. Before we did this for the first time, we were taken to the morgue so we could get used to the experience. I had never seen a dead person before. I don't remember the man's name or cause of death, but I remember his face as if it were yesterday. I remember the almost overwhelming sense I had that what separates the living from the dead is a thin veil. I don't know how else to describe what I felt. It was almost tangible. It may have been the result of some psychological disturbance on my part, but it was a very peaceful, and on some level hopeful, feeling I had in my gut. I felt oddly comforted when I might have felt afraid. I felt uncharacteristic hope when it would have been reasonable to feel sorrow or futility.

The second experience happened years later. I had become friends with a woman who lived in a nursing home. Ellen got a nasty infection and died a painful death. She died on a Saturday, and, as it turned out, I was to preach the following day. It was a hard sermon to deliver. But, as I left the pulpit and moved back to the altar to continue the service, I had a very, very powerful sense that everything was all right, that Ellen was OK, that she was at peace. I felt almost physically lifted up off the ground, the sense of peace was so strong. Again, this could have been the result of grief or release of some kind -- a purely subjective experience due to my emotional turmoil; but I think it was something that came to me, something that embraced me, from the outside.

I suspect it was something like this that the disciples experienced when they encountered the risen Jesus. I suspect they, quite to their surprise, felt a deep sense of peace, a sense of hope, a sense that, despite the horrific death and suffering of Jesus and despite their own great sense of loss at his death, somehow, everything was all right. I suspect they felt the transparency of the veil that separates the living from the dead and found in this transparency a reason to have hope. I believe that something happened, something powerful and life-transforming for the disciples; for I find no other way to explain the willingness of these ordinary men and women to risk everything in order to continue the work Jesus had begun.

Why doesn't God give us a clearer sign? Why doesn't God make it easier for us to believe that he is with us, even in suffering and death? My guess is that there is something essential, irreplaceable, and life-giving in having to step out in faith. There must be something God wants us to learn by wrestling with the elusiveness of the resurrection that we cannot learn in another way. This wrestling teaches us to distill what we believe, whom we trust, what we think life is for. It teaches us to love and take risks for what we believe and for the wellbeing of God's creatures. It teaches us about our dependence upon God alone.

What the church teaches -- and what I, most days, believe -- is that the God who brought something out of nothing at the beginning of time also brought life out of death at this particular point in time. He did so to tell us that we are loved, forgiven, and not alone. He did so to tell us to listen again to the stories Jesus told and to look again at the life Jesus lived. God raised Jesus from the dead so we could live out our days knowing in our guts if not in our heads that, somehow, all manner of things will be well.